When Craftybase Beat the Enterprise ERPs
Doug Peters evaluated NetSuite and Fishbowl before choosing Craftybase for Jack Henry. Two years on, Craftybase is the most reliable and data-rich part of their operations.
Doug Peters evaluated NetSuite and Fishbowl before choosing Craftybase for Jack Henry. Two years on, Craftybase is the most reliable and data-rich part of their operations.
Meet Doug.
Doug Peters is Director of Operations at Jack Henry, a mid-size personal care brand in the male grooming space. His remit covers inventory management, forecasting, production planning, purchasing, and fulfilment. When he came on board, the operations team was running COGS calculations in Google Sheets — manually, without cost averaging, and without the reliability a growing brand needs.
The finance team kept asking questions the Sheets couldn't reliably answer. Something had to change.
Google Sheets is where a lot of operations teams start. It's flexible, it's free, and it handles simple tracking. But when you're manufacturing personal care products across multiple SKUs, the math gets complicated fast. Ingredient costs change. Batch sizes vary. The cost per unit needs to reflect the actual weighted average across multiple purchase orders — not the price you paid three months ago.
A Sheets model can approximate that. It can't do it automatically, reliably, and consistently across every product. And when your finance team needs to trust those numbers for reporting, "close enough" isn't close enough.
Craftybase has become the most reliable and data-rich part of the business.
Ready to give your finance team COGS data they can actually trust?
Try Craftybase free for 14 daysDoug evaluated the options seriously. NetSuite and Fishbowl are both capable platforms — but capable in ways that come with significant complexity and cost. For a brand at Jack Henry's scale, they were more than what was needed, and the implementation overhead would have consumed resources the team didn't have.
The recommendation that led him to Craftybase came from an unexpected place: a conversation with a fellow operator in the personal care space. That kind of peer-to-peer recommendation carries more weight than a product page. He took a close look — and found that Craftybase's knowledge base, manufacturing-specific features, and pricing made it the right-sized answer.
Accurate COGS tracking: When Jack Henry purchases ingredients, Craftybase automatically calculates weighted average cost across purchases. The finance team now gets cost data they trust — not a spreadsheet estimate that requires manual reconciliation.
Batch planning with ingredient visibility: Before manufacturing, Doug checks what ingredients are available and adjusts batch sizes accordingly. Craftybase surfaces what he has, what he needs, and what that yields — without manual calculation.
Production notes for the team: Manufacturing instructions are added directly to production records in Craftybase and printed for the production team. It keeps the whole process documented in one place, not scattered across email threads or whiteboards.
Foundation for growth: As Jack Henry moves into a new warehouse, Doug is planning to use Craftybase's stock location features to bring the same clarity to physical inventory management. The platform has grown with the business rather than been outgrown by it.
For a growing brand that needed real operational data — not a spreadsheet approximation — Craftybase was the right call.
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